Puff Pant Prom Perspectives

It may have been the Roaring Twenties but, still, these all-women, long-trouser soirees in the Midwest are a remarkable showing of gender fluidity

I enjoy looking at old photographs of people. It’s endlessly fascinating to see the faces in photographs, and notice the subtle differences and expressions that come through from one image to the next. If you take the time to look, you can tell a lot about a person from how they choose to present themselves when they know they’re being photographed, and even more from how they appear when they are caught unaware. It’s very hard to hide who you are in a photograph.

One of my favorite ways to pass idle time, and spark my creativity, is to browse pictures of people from previous generations online. I love to scan archives of images from the 1900s and even the late 1800s, looking for faces that tell me something about what that person was feeling, and who they were. And as more institutions release archives of photographs from previous generations, the opportunity is sometimes irresistible.

“It’s very hard to hide who you are in a photograph.”

But I also love old books. There’s something almost naughty about flipping through the pages of a book that you know was previously read by someone else, or multiple someones, over the past hundred years or more. It’s as if you’re sitting there sharing a solo experience with a self-selected tribe of people you can never know or meet. And it’s frankly very intimate to stare unabashedly at a photograph of a person who can never again be there in that state, and probably never knew that you existed, printed on a piece of paper that was meant for somebody else from a different era. It’s a little like invading their privacy — but in reality they’re invading your private moment, and you’re inviting the intrusion.

Recently, my husband came across a discarded yearbook from a midwestern university from 1928. The book was printed before either of my parents was born, and it’s chockablock full of pictures of faces, poses, situations, and outfits specific to the time. Menswear rarely shows a great deal of variety, but women’s fashion is always a rich insight into the culture of a period. I found it particularly amusing to look at the group shots of the sorority women, who all had variations of the same Marcel wave in their hair, and dresses that cut off at the exact same point along the calf. I wondered if they realized at the time how uniform their look was. (I’ve never known a generation of proud individuals in this country that could admit that to itself in its heyday.)

“Menswear rarely shows a great deal of variety, but women’s fashion is always a rich insight into the culture of a period.”

But as I was flipping through the book, one thing caught me by surprise. I came across a single page of pictures from a prom where the men looked a little bit different. After looking a little closer, I realized right away that the men on the page were actually women, dressed up as men. They called it the Puff Pant Prom. It was a dance where no men were allowed, and half the attendees dressed like women, while the other half dressed like men.

Browsing through the photos, it was interesting to think about what this dance might have represented to people in 1928.

These pictures come from the end of the Roaring 20s, which is a time I’ve always associated with open-minded social philosophies and forward thinking fashion. But as far as I knew, gender fluidity still wasn’t considered broadly acceptable.

From the poses and the expressions, it’s clear that some of the people attending the Puff Pant Prom were enjoying the event as a bit of play-acting, while others were genuinely comfortable expressing cross gender roles.

It doesn’t all seem to be just dressing up. A few of the party-goers are clearly enjoying the opportunity to explore the other side of their gender identity.

There was just one page in the yearbook devoted to this dance. And I had never heard of a Puff Pant Prom before. So I did a little searching for the term online, and found a few references to similar dances at other universities from around the same time, although few were later than about 1936.

It was encouraging to see that gender play was being celebrated that long ago in the cornfed center of this increasingly conservative country, without obvious derogatory or offensive commentary.

It gives me a little bit of hope that we as a society might be able to recapture the openminded and free-thinking attitudes of our grandparents and great grandparents from the midwest of the 1920s in time for the coming 2020s.